In 1968, as a result of a number of fortuitous events and unfortunate political forces, I went to study — all too briefly — at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS).² To be honest, I had no idea what the Centre was. I had never heard of Richard Hoggart or Stuart Hall. I went with an interest in the 'social life" of ideas (philosophies) and popular symbols, and an abiding interest in how popular music functioned to bind together politics and the popular on the one hand, and the various fractions of what was then known as the counterculture on the other. I had no idea what cultural studies was — my professors at the University of Rochester assured me that I would feel intellectually at home there — but fortunately, most people at the Centre were equally uncertain. To reiterate a common phrase (first used, I think, by Angela McRobbie), we all understood that we were making it up as we went along. It was in the often fraught, contradictory and tension-filled (although too often, the differences have been oversimplified as if they could be reduced, for example, to the certainly real intellectual, stylistic and political differences between Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall) but for me always exciting, generous, and open-minded space of the Centre that the trajectory of my intellectual and political life was initiated.